17 Comments

A friend, now deceased, gave me a copy of Merton's "Seven Story Mountain". We talked a lot about his journey and evolution. I've always wondered what he might have accomplished if he hadn't (as seems likely) been murdered. I got more out of the talk than from the book. Some writing styles can be very difficult, through no fault of the writer.

Nice selection, as always, Mickey. They're all provocative in good ways.

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Thank you, James! I feel similarly about Merton, e.g. suspicious about his death, and finding some difficulty in reading his work but still being inspired by it.

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Merton was among the first to be killed by a fan...

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Is that a double entendre?

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Absolutely!

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Oh...the moose. The quote is perfect

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😇

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The fox meme brings up something for me, what an old friend said about coyotes. He said he would shoot every one of them he saw, because a coyote that came that close to people was no longer wild. (He was born in the 1920s, military reserve fellow). Then I thought about how the grandmother befriending the foxes by feeding them, and wondering whether she was truly making them weaker by the dependency on her, which would have in the long run possibly quite debilitating consequences for them. This is, in a nutshell, the problem of us. Maybe the grandma learned feeding the foxes kept them from the birds at her birdfeeder? Or her chickens? Types of detante? Wildness is easily lost, not easily regained. It ends up being a very deep question, who and what we befriend, and why. thanks so Mick.

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Thanks, Jacquelyn. I initially shared that meme because I felt it'd encourage people to consider a topic that is too often ignored: grief. But the angle you introduced is also very real and very important to ponder.

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Yeah, my lovely neighbor shot a coy-wolf because he's scared of them then seemed to brag about it to me. That night I heard the longest, most mournful howls; normally I only hear them yipping. I told him I didn't want him shooting anything on our land that he wasn't prepared to eat. He also stood in my kitchen waiting for me to thank him for his service. Not gonna happen.

That said, the photo of the little fox was taken in the U.K., bloody obvious. Foxes live in cities there and just seemingly go about their business. We feed the foxes (and lots of other animals) by all the goddamn food we throw out, and anyone who would "shoot every one of them" disgusts me.

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😢

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I love the coyotes and some of them are amazingly beautiful. Looked out the window one day wone was eating pears from under the pear tree, a beautiful reddish coy-wolf with a huge bushy tail. No, folks, it wasn't a fox, it was the size of a German shepherd.

(If people don't know, they finally did DNA studies on the "coyotes" in New England and discovered that grey wolves can interbreed with coyotes -- who one assumes came from out west -- and that's what we have. Europeans killed all the predators and left no one to take out the weak, the aged, and the sick, which is what top predators do who are not human.)

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I had to laugh out when I saw that tape messed up in the player! omg how many times did I have to put together broken tape and then hope for the best. At least you could hope for a repair, whereas damaged CDs are not repairable! thank God for YouTube!

Love that 9 senses !

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💖

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As always, thought provoking.

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Thank you 🙂

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Great ones - thanks Mickey for all this effort to shine some bright & healing light!!

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